Yes, it does say ‘slows’. There’s some rather convoluted logic about the present and future of Arctic sea ice going on here. Good luck to readers who think they can unravel it. But NASA does have to concede there’s a winter negative feedback going on, while doing its best to downplay possible consequences so as to keep the usual warming obsessions afloat.

New NASA research has found that increases in the rate at which Arctic sea ice grows in the winter may have partially slowed down the decline of the Arctic sea ice cover.

As temperatures in the Arctic have warmed at double the pace of the rest of the planet, the expanse of frozen seawater that blankets the Arctic Ocean and neighboring seas has shrunk and thinned over the past three decades.

Probably not, but this report loses some credibility and misleads readers when it claims: ‘But in 2014 the Nunavik became the first cargo ship to traverse the [Northwest] passage unescorted when it delivered nickel from the Canadian province of Quebec to China.’ It fails to mention the obviously important fact that Nunavik is an icebreaking bulk carrier.

Wikipedia says: ‘She is strengthened for navigation in ice according to the International Association of Classification Societies (IACS) Polar Class 4, which allows year-round operation in thick first-year ice which may include old ice inclusions. Furthermore, she fulfills the requirements for ice class ICE-15 by Det Norske Veritas.’ So hardly the run-of-the-mill cargo ship that the BBC pretends it is.

Having tried to talk up the prospects of opening up this sea route, a note of caution is sounded: ‘However, some Arctic experts are not convinced that the Northwest Passage will ever be a busy commercial trade route.’ As well as unpredictable sea ice, unfavourable geography and disputed territorial claims are among the issues.

Climate change is increasingly opening up the Northwest Passage, an Arctic sea route north of the Canadian mainland, says the BBC.

Could it herald an era of more cargo shipping around the top of the world?

However this is interpreted, ‘sixth highest on record’ doesn’t quite support the ‘rapid melting’ story so beloved of man-made climate alarm believers. It looks a lot more like natural variability, as the report suggests.

It’s time for the Greenland ice sheet’s annual health report, brought to you by scientists from the Danish Meteorological Institute and Polar Portal.

The end of August traditionally marks the end of the melt season for the Greenland ice sheet as it shifts from mostly melting to mostly gaining snow, says ScienceNordic.

Such predictions are usually wrong anyway, the real question being the degree of ‘wrong-ness’ compared to the actual data. The expected (by climate models) linear progression of global temperatures has fizzled out – inasmuch as it ever existed – since the ‘pause’, apart from a recent El Niño blip. Solar cycle activity is also declining compared to other recent cycles..

Current climate change predictions in the UK and parts of Europe may be inaccurate, a study conducted by researchers from the University of Lincoln, UK, and the University of Liège, Belgium, suggests.

Existing computer model simulations have failed to properly include air pressure changes that have occured in the Greenland region throughout the past 30 years, says The GWPF.

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With about the same minimum Arctic sea ice extent this season as 2008 and 2010, persistent claims of ‘rapid decline’ are looking more than threadbare, and polar bears don’t seem too bothered either, judging by the numbers. Climate scare merchants may have to look elsewhere to try and generate a headline.

We’ve hit the seasonal Arctic sea ice minimum for this year, called this morning by US NSIDC for 19th and 23rd of Septmeber: 4.59 mkm2, the same extent as 2008 and 2010. This is not a “ho-hum” year for polar bears: it means that since 2007, they have triumphed through 10 or 11 years1 with summer ice coverage below 5.0 mkm2 — levels that in 2007were expected to cause catastrophic declines in numbers.

Summer sea ice below 5.0 mkm2 were not expected to occur until about 2050, according to 2005/2006 sea ice models and polar bear specialists at the US Geological Survey (USGS). Polar bear survival models predicted 2/3 of the world’s polar bears would disappear when ice levels reached this threshold for 8 out of 10 years (Amstrup et al. 2007, 2008; Hunter 2007) but polar bears have been more resilientthan expected (Crockford 2017, 2018; Crockford…

The reporter here is obviously sold on endless warming of planet Earth, but ignoring the propaganda, there are some technical details of the mission which is due to last three years but could be extended up to ten. NASA says: ‘The ICESat-2 laser will pulse 10,000 times a second; each pulse will release about 20 trillion photons. Only about a dozen photons hit Earth’s surface and return to the satellite.’

NASA is poised to launch Saturday its most advanced space laser ever, ICESat-2, a $1 billion dollar mission to reveal the depths of the Earth’s melting ice as the climate warms, says Phys.org.

The half-ton satellite, about the size of a smart-car, is scheduled to blast off atop a Delta II rocket on September 15 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

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Maybe the Canadian coastguard should get more pro-active, and penalise anyone who ignores their warnings and then gets into difficulties.
– – –Heavy and difficult ice conditions this season may compromise the Northwest Passage transit of some vessels, the coast guard added. – Ottawa Citizen report.

The Canadian Coast Guard rescued two passengers of a sinking sailboat who were trapped on an ice floe in Arctic waters early Wednesday morning. The incident took place in Bellot Strait. (CBC) Drama in the northwest passageSailing yacht gets into drift ice in the middle of the night, gets breached and sinks within minutes. The crew had to flee onto sea ice Pascal Schürmann on 29.08.2018 https://www.yacht.de/aktuell/panorama/drama-in-der-nordwestpassage/a118316.html

Yesterday night, the French-flagged yacht “Anahita”, an aluminum Ovni 345, sank in Ballot Strait of the Northwest Passage. The disaster occurred in Depot Bay, just east of Bellot Strait. According to initial information, the ship was trapped by drifting sea ice from which it could not escape.

The course of “Anahita” from Nuuk on the coast of Greenland went via Baffin Bay to Pond Inlet and on to the entrance of Bellot Strait…

As the seasonal minimum for Arctic sea ice approaches, the media get carried away by hyperbole. Tha’t been true since 2007. This year, other outlets will need to work hard to beat yesterday’s bit of nonsense from The Independent trying to out-do The Guardian: it not only includes false polar bear facts (from sea ice researcher Peter Wadhams) but leads with last year’s controversialSeaLegacy video of an emaciated polar bear. Sea ice silly season has truly begun.

Wadhams (described as “one of the UK’s leading sea ice scientists” although not a particularly respected one) was interviewed about the small area of open water that opened up over the last few days in northern Greenland (see NSIDC photo below), driven by offshore winds (not melt). This region is the eastern-most part of the area that is considered the “last holdout” for Arctic sea ice: an immense band of…

One small wriggle for a worm, one giant…etc. This discovery has novelty value and should stir the imaginations of sci-fi writers, whatever its real significance may be.

The Siberian Times reports: Nematodes moving and eating again for the first time since the Pleistocene age in major scientific breakthrough, say experts.

The roundworms from two areas of Siberia came back to life in Petri dishes, says a new scientific study.

‘We have obtained the first data demonstrating the capability of multicellular organisms for longterm cryobiosis in permafrost deposits of the Arctic,’ states a report from Russian scientists from four institutions in collaboration with Princetown University.

In June 2018, Arctic ice extent held up against previous years despite the Pacific basins of Bering and Okhotsk being ice-free. The Arctic core is showing little change, perhaps due to increased thickness (volume) as reported by DMI.

The image above shows ice extents on day 195 (July 14) for years 2007, 2012, 2017 and 2018. Note this year ice is strong on both Russian and N. American sides. Beaufort Sea and Canadian Archipelago are solid. E. Siberian and Chukchi Seas are also solid, despite early melting in Bering Sea. Hudson and Baffin bays still have considerable ice compared to other years.

The graph below shows how the Arctic extent has faired in July compared to the 11 year average and to some years of interest. Note that 2018 started July well above the 11 year average and other recent years. As of day 195 (yesterday) ice extent is still…

Wednesday 21 June is the longest day of the year: wear something white tomorrow to acknowledge and celebrate the success of polar bears despite such low summer sea ice since 2007 that 2/3 of them were predicted to disappear.

White tie, white shirt, white socks work too. Keep cool and signal to the world that you love outstanding survivors of climate change, fat though they may be.

Until now, my scientific paper post at PeerJ Preprints for review, about the failure of Steve Amstrup’s 2007 USGS polar bear survival model (Crockford 2017), has been formally ignored by Amstrup and his colleagues. But now Amstrup and his colleagues have taken to lying to the media about my analysis because he can’t refute it in a scholarly manner.

Amstrup was quoted by Erica Goode in her New York Times article on the Harvey et al. (2018) BioScienceattack paperpublished Tuesday (10 April 2018: “Climate Change Denialists Say Polar Bears Are Fine. Scientists Are Pushing Back”):

“Dr. Amstrup, however, said that according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the average September sea ice extent for the years 2007 to 2017 was 4.5 million square kilometers, “nowhere near the low levels projected it would be by the middle of the century.”

So says a new study, which also has the benefit of being topical. The current weak solar cycle is highlighted.

Periods of extreme cold winter weather and perilous snowfall, similar to those that gripped the UK in a deep freeze with the arrival of the ‘Beast from the East’, could be linked to the solar cycle, pioneering new research has shown.

A new study, led by Dr Indrani Roy from the University of Exeter, has revealed when the solar cycle is in its ‘weaker’ phase, there are warm spells across the Arctic in winter, as well as heavy snowfall across the Eurasian sector, reports Phys.org.

Temperatures at the earth’s surface on February 25 at 1200 GMT [image credit: phys.org]

The role of the lowest solar cycle for at least a century is mostly ignored by believers in man-made global warming. There are signs of climate change, but not necessarily the kind they expect.

Not for the first time in recent years, Europe has descended into a deep freeze while the Arctic experiences record high temperatures, leaving scientists to ponder the role global warming may play in turning winter weather upside down, says Phys.org.

Unusual for the start of March in the UK perhaps, but this looks quite tame compared to forecasts of well below -15C (overnight) for some parts of central Europe.

Forecasters warn of prolonged spell of icy and snowy conditions into early March, reports The Week.

The United Kingdom is bracing for a severe wintry snap in the coming days, as a blast of cold weather dubbed the “Beast from the East” approaches.

The icy conditions are believed to be caused by a weather phenomenon called a “sudden stratospheric warming” above the North Pole, which will drag very cold air from Siberia to the UK as early as next week.

The researchers believe Saharan air reaching the Arctic was a rare but significant factor in an unusual warming event two years ago.

In the winter of 2015/16, something happened that had never before been seen on this scale: at the end of December, temperatures rose above zero degrees Celsius for several days in parts of the Arctic, reports Phys.org. Temperatures of up to eight degrees were registered north of Svalbard.

Temperatures this high have not been recorded in the winter half of the year since the beginning of systematic measurements at the end of the 1970s. As a result of this unusual warmth, the sea ice began to melt.

Some climate scientists are pointing the finger at manmade global warming as a culprit behind recent wintry weather, but there’s not a lot of evidence or agreement that global warming is currently driving extreme cold and snow.

Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann authored a blog post for the Climate Reality Project, former Vice President Al Gore’s group, claiming what’s happening is “precisely the sort of extreme winter weather we expect because of climate change.” Mann’s argument is that we can expect more “bomb cyclones” and cold snaps as the planet warms.

But Mann, who often invokes the “consensus” on global warming, seems out of step with the evidence on this issue.

Another attempt to use the law to get a court to take on the role of government over supposed climate issues bites the dust, assuming no appeal. The green groups were ordered to pay the state’s $94,000 legal costs.

Oslo District Court on Thursday ruled that Norway’s drilling for oil in the Barents Sea does not violate a constitutional right to a healthy environment, reports The Barents Observer.

The government acts in accordance with the law when awarding new petroleum exploration licenses for the Barents Sea, the ruling by Oslo District Court reads. Greenpeace, one of the three organizations which filed the lawsuit, has published the court’s 49-pages comprehensive ruling.